The present invention relates to the cleaning of textile fibers and particularly to apparatus and methods for removing relatively small particles of debris from cotton fibers which typically are not removed by ginning and other preliminary preparation and cleaning operations.
As is well known, harvested cotton characteristically has a considerable amount of debris and foreign matter therein, such as seed, boll, leaves, plant trash and ordinary dirt and dust, which must be substantially removed before the fiber can be processed into yarn. Ginning is the operation on which is primarily relied to perform the most substantial portion of such cleaning of cotton but, although ginning equipment and operations have been substantially improved over recent years to cope with the greater amounts of debris which result from mechanized harvesting, convential ginning is unable to remove all such debris, particularly the smaller particles of debris.
As a result, a wide variety of supplemental cleaning apparatus and methods have been proposed and used at various points throughout the conventional cotton processing system to attempt to perform further cleaning of the cotton fibers subsequent to ginning. Since it is common practice to convey fibers from one processing location to another by entraining the fibers in a moving airstream, one widely employed type of arrangement includes the provision of some form of screen or filter in the airstream path for separating the fibers from the airstream while enabling any particles of debris in the airstream to pass therewith through the screen. One nagging problem which occurs in this type of cleaning operation is the tendency of the fibers to be held against the screen by the airstream and to progressively accumulate on the screen. Various mechanisms have been devised to avoid this problem, including the use of rotating or moving screen arrangements, the provision of wipers or the like to periodically remove accumulated fibers from the screen and other similar arrangements. Unfortunately, such arrangements, while generally effective for their intended purpose, render the basic cleaning devices more complicated and correspondingly more costly.
In contrast, the present invention provides a screen-type apparatus and method for cleaning small debris particles from cotton fibers which is of a simple and inexpensive construction and operation effective to avoid fiber accumulation on the screen thereof without any complicated wiping or moving screen arrangements or the like and is adapted for use at virtually any location in the cotton processing system subsequent to ginning and prior to carding.